Clive Beale, our Director of Educational Development, was at the Guardian’s Activate conference two weeks ago. He was giving a talk in the alarming and upsetting PechaKucha format, where twenty slides are displayed for twenty seconds each, giving the speaker six minutes and forty seconds to talk in twenty-second bursts. Hats off, Clive: I swear there’s no format more terrifying. (If anyone ever asks me to do one of these, I’ll just show twenty landscape photographs. Scratch that: if anyone ever asks me to do one of these, I’ll say no.)

I love PechaKucha as a live format. Not such a fan of it in video form though — people pick up on things that you couldn’t backtrack on or elucidate or, you know, stuff you just made up or get completely and utterly wrong ;)

Some years ago (20? 25? Maybe more…) an organization I was active in was invited to do a 5 minute presentation to the US National Parks Association. Three different groups of people announced plans to make a short video for it and all three fell through.

As a backup plan, I spent the better part of a year shooting over 1000 slides. I then edited them down and sequenced them as a storyboard. The slides were shown at about 4 second intervals and one of our members sang a song to go with.